Bow police officer continues trek up Mount Everest

BOW - A local police officer taking part in a Mount Everest expedition was not injured by the recent avalanche.

Bow officer Jake St. Pierre was reportedly headed to a base camp on Everest the day after an avalanche killed 13 people on April 18. It was the single deadliest accident on the mountain.

Team member Ulyana Horodyskyj reported on her blog that she and her team of scientists and Sherpas were all okay, and that the group's arrival at base camp had been delayed a day because of illness. The avalanche occurred above the camp.

Horodyskyj and St. Pierre had spent the previous 10 days working in Gokyo Valley, the next valley over from Mt. Everest, she wrote.

"As you read this we will have just departed for Mt. Everest base camp, but before leaving, Jake and I had to take a detour to Ngozumpa that lasted several days," Horodyskyj wrote in a post dated April 18.

St. Pierre began his third trek to Mount Everest in March as part of the American Climber-Science Program. The project is run by the American Alpine Club and Black Ice Himalaya, a research organization associated with the University of Colorado, Boulder. His agenda included climbing 27,000 feet on Mt. Everest and scaling Lhotse, the fourth-highest peak in the world, according to his website. Members of the group are studying glacier-melting rates, pollution levels at extreme altitudes, and some meteorological and vegetative studies.

St. Pierre plans to spend two months gathering samples and data on Everest and Lhotse, according to his site.